Reader Check In: What We Loved And Lost, And How We’re Looking Forward
It’s now approximately four months since the pandemic hit us for real. To paraphrase former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, how are we doing? Rural Intelligence asked some long-time readers in a variety of fields to reflect on what they miss from their pre-COVID lives and how they are compensating for those losses. We thank each of them for their thoughtful, heartfelt responses.
The Singer
Amanda Boyd is a soprano who lives in Kinderhook, New York.
Silent Notes
Since being ‘locked away’ in our Covidian existence, I find myself more silent than ever.
I was obsessively working on an upcoming American premiere of song cycle Kindersang, composed by Deirdre Gribbin, poetry by a Kindertransport survivor. A story close to home. My grandfather was a Kindertransport survivor.
April 6th. My blind date with an audience.
The foot tapping, nose picking, candy wrapper rustling, coughing, tutting, cellphone vibrating, yawning, laughing, noisy, quiet, clapping, loving, beautiful audience. An audience millions of us performing artists now crave.
I was on my pre-performance health wagon: Daily rehearsals, Pilates and a diet that would make any nutritionist green with lettuce envy. I was ready and excited to share this haunting rendition of a fragmented time in history.
Friday, March 13th. A pivotal day in NY State and my oldest son’s 16th birthday. Eliot’s request was a burger at Grazin’ Diner and his learner’s permit at the DMV. Maybe the last one processed in Hudson and perhaps our last ever Grazin’ meal. And Cuomo’s announcement of school closings.
I was propelled into a new role: Homeschool Teacher. My sophomore studied solo. My second grader.…
As a voice teacher, I throw tools at my students, teaching them how to improve an instrument they can’t see. My homeschool toolkit was rather empty. Online work was posted and I guided, directed, strategized (sometimes bribed), and did my best to educate my eight year old.
Have I made sourdough bread, learned a new language, built a vegetable garden in the bathtub, written a novel? No.
However, I have laughed, cried, danced, watched the BBC news with G&Ts, zoomed my family in England, cooked, held hands with my husband, walked in our orchard with my dogs. I have been a caring mother to my beautiful, curious children, creating a safe, confident environment in our ever-changing, vulnerable world.
My heart aches for my singing. It’s an old friend that keeps me healthy, happy and sane. It expresses my deepest self and shares poets’ stories and composers’ melodies. The empty seats bring a veil of silence. Maybe it’s time to sing to my walls and prepare for future blind dates with an audience.
The Author
Simon Winchester is the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman and many other nonfiction titles. He lives in Sandisfield, Mass.
Weather
Climate change may be my faith; but weather is my religion, and most especially on Sundays. And during these past months of solitude I have been practicing my religion more keenly than ever before.
My little farmhouse high on a hilltop in the southern Berkshires is liberally supplied with the icons of my beliefs: there are barometers and rain gauges, hygrometers and an anemometer. There is a sunshine recorder (propped up by an old book of mine) and, best of all, the holiest of grails — a fine-looking clockwork-powered barograph handmade by a small craftworks in England. This delightful instrument ticks away contentedly, day after day, night after night, recording on a paper graph mounted to a big brass drum the slightest hour-by-hour changes in atmospheric pressure, fifteen hundred feet up in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.
My parents gave it to me as a 65th birthday present in 2001. For most of the thousand Sundays since I have risen early, changed the recording paper, put in more ink, wound the drum. I have performed, in other words, a Sabbath ritual every bit as solemn to me as the ringing of the incense bells or the incantation of the Nicene creed.
I used to travel, ferociously, and I wasn't always able to get back home in time. But now, in these weeks and months of enforced domesticity, every Sunday has been the same, my meteorological rituals have been fully performed and my treasure-stack of millibar traces has been ever multiplying.
I may miss my former habit of world-wandering, but Sandisfield's weather has now been tracked like never before, and some high priest, somewhere, will be looking down kindly as a result. As to what will happen to the climate: my ink will have run out long before we know the answer. Belief in that simply has to remain a faith.
The Marketing Consultant
Diane Meier is an author and president of Meier, a New York City-based marketing firm. She lives in Northwest Connecticut.
The Rural Intelligence of The Great Pause
I build equity for companies and brands; in part, by reading the culture and understanding the ways assets can be created, ignited, or developed in perception or value. Manhattan embodied my drive. It carried my family’s history. And for decades, the streets of the city were my tea leaves. The material that drove insight. But here we are. Lockdown in the Northwest corner. Surrounded by beauty and calm and Nature. Yikes.
Was I afraid of what I might lose? Of course. But to my great relief, I’ve found that I’m no less informed and certainly no less effective right here. Quite the opposite. Teams of clients, expanded staff, experts and consultants are available to me, and I to them, from everywhere in the world. And my inspiration flies in on a screen.
Across digital publications and countless platforms, one can’t miss an enormous interest in immune-boosting nutrition, and products that support sustainable practices. There’s more interest in Science and Biotech than I’ve seen since the invention of the heart transplant. Corporate positioning is now inextricably linked to traceable social responsibility. And when cities erupted just weeks ago, and important brands immediately posted that they “stood with the protestors,” a cultural exhale was equal to thunder. I’ve always known what to make of the signals, but now they’re even more visible and far more diverse, from London and Sydney to Omaha. Suddenly, the streets of New York seem provincial.
To the right of my screen, a full view of our East Field reveals a great horned owl who comes to sit each evening behind a cowlick of grass. Hydrangeas are blooming and trumpet flowers are about to burst. The skies are always changing. The Natural World is just being noticed, now that my gaze can encompass the cultural, the commercial, and the natural by just shifting focus at my desk in the Big Barn.
Ingmar Bergman once said that he couldn’t have a clear thought on the streets of New York. I suspect he would have appreciated the dramas of our hawks and bears, and the views of the field and the Litchfield Hills. And if he was uninterested in reading the cultural messages buried on the small screen, he wasn’t expected to save billion-dollar companies. For those of us who are asked to do just that, the new idea that where we live can deliver the beauty of Nature and the vitality of Commerce is an amazing gift I’m not taking lightly. But in the spirit of what I do –– I know I’m not alone in this revelation, either.
In that regard, I welcome my new neighbors to the world of “Rural Intelligence.” If ever a name were right and proper, it’s found its moment. Realizing this surely has been, at least for me, one of the great gifts in The Great Pause.
The Party Planner
Amy Rudnick is a leading event planner for nonprofit galas in the Berkshires.
Reinvention
Just this morning a Facebook memory popped up on my feed. It was a photo from the Shakespeare & Company gala of three years ago. I suddenly realized how much I miss my work planning live events. And how much I miss feeling fulfilled when, during an event, usually in a tent, I look out over the few hundred guests who are creating a happy buzz all in support of an organization that they love. If these were normal times, I would be just finishing up one or two galas and moving on to the details of the next few: talking to caterers, florists and rental companies, and arranging dinner and theater seating. And especially watching the weather! Now, I only care about the weather if it interferes with my daily long walks.
Of course, during the pandemic, there are no in-person galas, no gatherings, no getting dressed up. But fundraising still goes on and now in this challenging landscape, supporting our beloved Berkshires arts and non-profit institutions is more important than ever. Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case, re-invention. The non-profit sector needed to pivot quickly and figure out how to keep audiences engaged and donations coming in. And pivot they did. We are now all hunkering down and watching virtual galas – entertaining, mission-driven fundraisers broadcast online. Berkshires summer weekends were chock full of in-person events; well, they are still chock full of events, except they’re being enjoyed from the comfort of our own homes.
Working on virtual events for my clients is adding something new to my skill set, but I can’t wait for the day when I look out over those few hundred people celebrating together in a tent. Even in the rain.
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